While such animus is out of step with mainstream opinion, it’s clear that the coronation has lost its romance and even its meaning among much of the wider public. Two-thirds of respondents tell YouGov pollsters that they either don’t care very much or don’t care at all about the ceremony. Only 9% of Britons said they care “a great deal”, and that cohort tends elderly.

Modern Britons may well ask: why do we find ourselves locked into a ritual — a religious ritual, to be precise — inherited from the ancient past? Even if some share the Christian faith that underpins rituals like the coronation, can’t they practise that faith privately, without the need for a solemn, state-sanctioned ceremony involving bishops, priests, crowns, sceptres, and holy oils? Why do we need public ritual at all?

All this is a tragedy, because old rituals like the coronation can play a deeply salutary — and even progressive — role in societies otherwise wracked by modern capitalism’s cruel, arbitrary hierarchies. We human beings do all sorts of things that have no functional value in themselves but that help us communicate symbolically. We shake hands. We exchange rings. We are wired, it seems, for ritual: a pattern of words and actions characterised by formality, rigidity, and repetition. The closest analogous human behaviour, according to many anthropologists, is children’s games.

In the middle of the last century, a husband-and-wife team of British anthropologists travelled to Africa in an attempt to scientifically understand the ritual process. Specifically, they sought the meaning of religious rites among traditional tribes; ultimately, it awakened them to the indispensability of ritual for decent societies.

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Victor Witter Turner was born in 1920 in Glasgow. As a teenager, under the tutelage of an Anglican priest, he was drawn to mystical traditions. But by the time “Vic” entered university and married, he had become a card-carrying Communist. His wife, “Edie”, had also embraced Marxism early on, because it was a worldview “wrung clean of religion”.

In the late Forties, the couple discovered Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in a public library. It inspired Vic to study anthropology: he was thrilled by the thought of living hand-to-mouth in remote places, and drawn, too, to the “neat social systems among indigenous islanders” that seemed to exist “like an organism with its own social structural laws”. He worked under Max Gluckman, the legendary leader of the structural anthropology movement based at the University of Manchester, who dispatched Vic to central Africa to study “chieftainship politics”.

Ritual, of course, was central to defining the individual’s roles within the “neat social systems” in which he was interested. For example, many tribal peoples mark the passage from childhood to adulthood with highly elaborate rites, whereas in the modern West, childhood often merges imperceptibly with adulthood, leaving it to each individual to figure out what it means to “come of age”.

Many anthropologists then dismissed tribal ritual as the unintelligible mumbo-jumbo of a “simpler” people. But in 1951, Gluckman sent Vic a telegram urging him to switch to researching the religious practises of the Ndembu people of south central Africa. Edie came along. The Turners’ time among the Ndembu convinced them that such supercilious attitudes were false. “In matters of ritual as of art,” Vic would write years later in his seminal 1969 text, The Ritual Process, “there are no ‘simpler’ peoples, only peoples with simpler technologies than our own. Man’s imaginative and emotional life is always and everywhere rich and complex.”

Zambia, where the Turners encountered the people, was then a British colony known as Northern Rhodesia. Nevertheless, the Ndembu welcomed the foreign couple’s attempts to understand their rituals, even inviting them to participate. The Turners studied the Isoma, a rite that treated women suffering from infertility. The central action of the ritual involved the afflicted woman and her husband walking in the nude several times between two holes, one identified as “cold” and the other “hot”, representing both the grave and the birth canal. In this way, the ritual reconciled the once-warring communities of the living and the dead.

The Dutch-German anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, whose ideas the Turners borrowed, taught that every rite involves three stages. First, a separation, when the subjects are removed from the social structure. Next, the liminal stage, when the subjects become indeterminate, ambiguous, outcast even: during the core action of the Isoma, the afflicted couple no longer occupy their symbolic roles as husband and wife; their nakedness signifies that they are more like new-borns, or the dead. Finally, there is a reaggregation, when the subjects return to the social structure, either in a new condition — a boy emerges as a man after the extreme trials of the coming-of-age ritual — or merely restored to their prior condition — the afflicted couple now “healed” by Isoma.

The Turners focused their analysis on the middle stage. As Vic explained, liminal beings “are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”. To become liminal is to assume a transcendent vulnerability; it is the condition of Christ on the Cross. The humiliation of the liminal subject, for the Turners, fostered communitas, a state apart from the structured hierarchies we inhabit most of our lives. Communitas, a primordial state beyond rank and class, reminds us that the high and mighty have their status only in relation to the low, and “he who is high must experience what it is like to be low”.

Before he assumed power, a Ndembu chieftain had to undergo ritual humiliation at the hands of a mythic figure known as the Kafwana; coded female, she was associated with the land and the people who tilled it, those who weren’t politically or militarily strong but who nevertheless possessed a sacral power. Among other things, the chieftain-to-be had to absorb a barrage of insults and criticisms from other villagers; once installed, he didn’t dare hold it against the people. In this way, the religious ritual taught the chieftain that he was first and foremost a servant.

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By humbling himself, and dispensing with his normal privileges, the one undergoing the ritual must recognises what Vic called “humankindness”: “a generic bond between men.” Without it, the hierarchical community has no qualms about excluding and even destroying the weak. Far from locking people into the past, then, ritual allows them to confront present and future challenges. Ritual, in this telling, humanises societies.

On the surface, the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla is about as distant as can be from the chieftainship ritual of the Ndembu people. But the rite’s underlying structures are are shockingly similar. The Anglican ceremonial adds several layers of Christian symbolism, not to mention genteel ornamentation — all of which softens the liminal humiliation of the king-to-be and his bride — but the fundamental process is the same.

First, there is the separation of the ritual subjects — Charles and Camilla — from humdrum British reality. This is marked by their carriage ride to Westminster Abbey. Next comes the liminal stage, where Charles’s face is literally covered by Anglican churchmen, using a canopy of golden cloth, known as the anointing screen. The covering shields the most sacred element of the ritual from prying eyes, but it also means that Charles is erased as an individual.

The core action of the liminal stage is the anointing of king’s hands, breast, and head with oil. In the Bible, such oils are the mark of the self-sacrificing King of Kings: Jesus is anointed before he is to undergo his passion, death, and burial. Once the screen is removed, the anointed king will kneel at the high altar while the archbishop recalls how “Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God … was anointed with the Oil of gladness above his fellows.” Thus Charles, as a Christian statesman, is united with the sacrifice of Christ. He is giving up something, trading his personality for that of the sovereign, dutybound to serve the commonweal.

Finally, there is Charles’s reaggregation: he re-enters society with elevated status, symbolised by the crown and sceptre. But again, this occurs only after he has ritually identified himself with society’s victims — indeed, with the anointed Victim. All this marks him out as the servant-ruler of the British people, rather than merely a king.

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Today’s economic hierarchies tell the winners that they owe their status to no one and nothing but their own “meritocratic” efforts. This isn’t, in fact, true: study after study demonstrates that social mobility has stalled, especially in the Anglosphere. But it makes for particularly obnoxious elites: if they owe their status to no one, then they also have no obligations to society’s losers. Against such a backdrop, Britain’s traditional monarchic rituals, not least the coronation, are a very different, and much-needed, account of what the high owes the low.

When we glimpse the communitas lying beyond everyday structures — when we leave behind profane everyday reality to play the solemn, cosmic game of ritual — we are possessed by a vision of what society could or should look like. Here, the mighty chieftain submits to the lowly Kafwana. Here, the omnipotent Son of God consents to be humiliated. And His Majesty the King consents to follow the mortified god-man, even into the tomb.

When it comes to their media image, things could be worse for the House of Windsor. Last week, the fifth Netflix season of The Crown began after an overture of outrage deploring the drama’s distortion or fabrication of various episodes in royal history during the Nineties. While former premiers (John Major and Tony Blair) rail against the “malicious nonsense” and “complete rubbish” in the scripts, few champions of the “Firm” have paused to reflect that, even now, the royals enjoy a smoother ride than many of their ancestors.

James Gillray’s 1791 print “Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14”, described above, added one more acid drop to the flood of satirical engravings that lampooned the Hanoverian monarchy — along with other pillars of the ruling class — between 1780 and 1820. In this “golden age of caricature”, with Gillray, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson as its lords of misrule, palace misconduct and political intrigue unleashed a level of obscene ridicule that makes the snide smears of The Crown’s lead writer Peter Morgan feel like the softest of touches.

Yet a glib contrast between Georgian ferocity and 21st-century gentility will only take us so far. The stance of the shape-shifting Gillray, in particular, is famously hard to pin down. Tim Clayton’s definitive new study of the artist, James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire, notes that his “ambiguous, enigmatic” pen means that “it is rare in mature Gillray for either side to be entirely right or wrong”. Is “Hopes of the Party” an awful warning against the sanguinary horrors of French Revolutionary radicalism (Gillray engraved it two years after the Bastille fell, but before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette)? Or could it be interpreted as a parody of reactionary scare-mongering, a jibe at whipped-up alarms about the rotund Whig leader Charles James Fox — who features as George’s III’s executioner, while his gaunt Tory foe William Pitt dangles from that rope — and his reformist comrades? Proper satire slices both ways: different strokes for different folks.

Yes, Gillray and his colleagues could be brutal. In “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion”, the bloated, gluttonous Prince of Wales recovers from his vices with an overflowing chamber-pot and bottles of pox-pills behind him. Chamber pots, in fact, became something of a running gag with Gillray. In “Lubber’s Hole — Or — the Crack’d Jordan” (“jordan” was slang for a chamber-pot), the future William IV, then Duke of Clarence, dives through a suggestive gash into a giant receptacle that represents his long-term mistress, the actress Dorothea Jordan. Even when he opted for an epic style, Gillray might be gross. In “Sin, Death and the Devil”, which alludes in his richly inter-textual way to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wrinkled-breasted, Gorgon-haired Queen Charlotte intercedes in a fight between the naked Pitt and Thurlow (a rival minister), with her hand clasped over Pitt’s genitals. Although that particular scene did apparently give offence to King and Queen, the rudeness — and crudeness — of the “Prince of Caricatura” and his epoch can never be mapped neatly onto anti-Hanoverian attitudes.

Indeed, Gillray’s portrayals of George III and his consort as cheese-paring peasant bumpkins — as in “Frying Sprats, Toasting Muffins” — edged into outright affection. Gillray’s heyday coincided not with a fall but a rise in the royal household’s popularity after the débâcle of the American Revolution. When the widely-welcomed revolt against elite injustices in France turned regicidal and expansionist after 1792, the cross-Channel threat rallied sceptics to the House of Hanover. In “Anti-Saccharrites”, the frugal King is urging sugar-less tea on his daughters not simply to cut costs but as a blow against the West Indian slave trade. What “a Noble Example of Oeconomy”! And in Gillray’s master-stroke of loyalist toilet humour, “The French Invasion — Or — John Bull Bombarding the Bum-boats”, sturdy patriotism and poo gags reach a joint apotheosis. George III has morphed into the map of Britain itself (although he still wears a dunce’s cap in the shape of Northumberland) as he craps majestically — from somewhere around Lyme Regis — all over the hapless French fleet. As Tim Clayton puts it: “The daubs of the caricaturist produced no contempt for ‘Farmer George and his wife.’”

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Never mistake vulgarity for venom. Partisans both of the Windsors and the digital dukes of Netflix (a new elite if ever there was one) should reflect that mere rudeness about royals, however scurrilous or scatological, might not weaken monarchy itself. Critique, mockery and caricature — dim, cheapskate kings, randy, farting princes, blowsy mistresses and all — could leave the institution intact if the idea behind it remained robust. The flawed royal person (in Gillray’s time, that meant above all George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, then Prince Regent and, at long last, George IV) might guzzle, booze, schmooze, fornicate and plunder at will. But if the core faith in monarchy held, an artist’s vitriol-tipped burin would not in itself corrode the crown.

For much of the audience could still separate frail individual from sacred office. The medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies — one fallible and mortal, the other an impersonal “body politic” — just about survived in many minds. In his terrific book on London in the great age of satire, City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell argues that star caricaturists “didn’t aim to influence the common people, still less to subvert the monarchical principle”. Besides, mockery usually shadows flattery. Dr Johnson dreaded the time when his name would cease to provoke “calumny or ridicule… for then I would be neglected and forgotten”.

Once the firm hold of an ideal starts to slip, however, and the public no longer accepts a necessary gap between person and principle, then even mild and oblique sniping, Netflix-style, may take a toll. In a disenchanted time, private life and public role have to align. Of course, the player in the royal show who best grasped — and acted on — that insight was the late Elizabeth II. Whereas the politician who has most shamelessly tried to revive in his favour an ancient distinction between the errant human being and the august office-holder who “got all the big calls right” was none other than Boris Johnson. Now there’s a target for some Gillray Redux.

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Gillray, Cruikshank and co. assaulted the royal family but not the royal function. In the age of Tom Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, real revolutionaries certainly did the latter. The circles of the graphic satirists seldom overlapped with theirs, although in the 1810s the Cruikshank brothers would forge stronger radical links. However, even the implacable George Cruikshank fell prudently silent on royal matters after a paltry-sounding royal bribe in 1820.

In 1797, Gillray himself had taken a £200 pension from the Tories while remaining a “deniable” loose cannon. For many years he lived and worked in St James’s Street, in the belly of the Establishment beast. He would have spotted his victims en route to club, town-house or palace. Some called in to buy the sort of prints that depicted them as grotesque bags of piss, pus and wind. Fox himself — the engraver’s beloved bugbear over many years — dropped by to purchase a portrayal of himself as a swarthy, sinister Jacobin insurrectionist (“A Meeting of Unfortunate Citoyens”). He left Hannah Humphrey (Gillray’s landlady, publisher and chaste life-partner) with a cheery “Good morning to you”. The Prince of Wales himself made sure that lackeys came in to buy successive caricatures of his flabby royal personage. There were many of those. Between 1803 and 1810, the Prince’s establishment at Carlton House spent £57 (a lot) on Gillray prints of their master as a preposterous balloon of lust and greed. Sometimes, he just wanted them taken off the market. But vanity loves even a distorting mirror.

You might say that the surface cruelty of Gillray’s time masked an underlying kindness, or at least solidarity. The royal satirists wanted to rock the boat but not to sink the ship. Whereas The Crown lavishes an unctuous, pseudo-respectful concern on its characters (Morgan has called the series a “love-letter” to the late Queen) while not caring too much if it does its bit to send the yacht of monarchy beneath the waves. You may think that a desirable outcome. If so, then the comic hyperbole of Gillray and Cruikshank would offer a more honest mode for hostile royal soap-opera than Netflix’s gear-crashing blend of fancily-written tittle-tattle with boring slabs of po-faced court reportage for “balance”.

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At the high noon of caricature, ribaldry and reverence could rub along together. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s slide from liberator to despot (brilliantly chronicled by Gillray himself) handily blocked the path in many British minds that might have led from burlesque to the barricades. In any case, chortles tend to limit theoretical critique. As Clayton says of prints such as Gillray’s “Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials”, with the Turkish ambassador pointing a long phallic scroll at the royal couple as Pitt the pet monkey cowers at their feet, “they induce laughter, not hatred”. Even (especially?) at their rudest, Georgian and Regency graphic satires have a strong flavour of Carry on up the Throne-room.

Their artists’ slaps and digs bruised Hanoverian flesh but broke no vital bones. Once the tide turned in the direction of reform and respectability in the 1820s and 1830s, memories of the debauched Prince Regent and his idle clan did nothing to stop the emergence of Victoria and Albert as discreet, bourgeois monarchs for an increasingly discreet, bourgeois nation. Today, in contrast, the simpering faux compassion of The Crown has neither the candour of a principled aversion to royalty nor the coherence of a principled defence. Gillray and the satire squad’s tough love did not kill the monarchy; arguably, they made it stronger. In contrast, the unaccountable plutocracy at Netflix want to stifle it in a long, slow, sickly kiss of death.

In episode two, Jonathan Pryce’s Philip tells his (much) younger blonde friend Penny: “The one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together” is “grow in separate directions”. His imagined advice to the vulnerable Diana (preparing to detonate her Andrew Morton “bomb”) is even more incriminating: “Be creative… you can do whatever you want, you can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness”, as long as “you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public”. But the show doesn’t dare go further.

Likewise Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth has always been a tough subject for biographers. There is no hard evidence that Philip was unfaithful, and while Her Majesty was still alive the issue was all the more sensitive. This may explain the strange detour in Gyles Brandreth’s otherwise excellent biography Philip, the Final Portrait. Promising an interrogation of the Duke’s reputation as a womaniser, Brandreth seeks to establish what Freud would have made of Philip’s female-heavy early childhood. (He was a longed-for son arriving late into a family of four girls.)

Brandreth explores the hypothetical possibility of Philip having “penis awe”, perhaps even “phallic swagger” — both conditions which apparently stem from disproportionate female attention and devotion when young. He tells us what we already know: that Philip liked the company of young attractive women, but his discussion with a Freudian psychologist is inconclusive. Apparently, men with “phallic swagger” aren’t always serial adulterers.

Had Brandreth really wanted to land a psychobabble blow, he would have looked into the male role models in Philip’s life. There was his father’s failed marriage and glamorous lady friends in the Riviera, his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s notoriously “open” marriage, not to mention his Greek uncle Big George and Marie Bonaparte’s “unconventional” relationship. Monogamy did not have much currency in the Duke’s wider family.

In many respects Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage was in keeping with the pair’s pedigree, upbringing and exceptional status. What went on behind closed doors in their marriage is a moot point and one which has disproportionately focused on the importance of monogamy at the expense of arguably greater goals — an enduring marriage and stable family monarchy.

Aristocrats have long played by different rules, and in the first half of the 20th century, when marriages were often undertaken for practical and dynastic reasons, an exclusive physical relationship was rarely a prerequisite for a lasting union. Between the wars, commentators promoted the idea of emotional and spatial independence in marriage. In 1935 co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council, Edward Griffith, recommended “the independence of each must be guaranteed”. Others were more explicit: “A woman may love her husband with all her heart, but even love needs an occasional rest.” And those women, invariably without an income of their own, had to shut up and put up.

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But times were changing fast. Service girls, having enjoyed rare freedom outside the domestic arena during the war, bought into new idealised notions of a companionate marriage. These modern unions were based on affection, friendship, and sexual gratification; it was anticipated that a spouse would meet all of their partner’s emotional and physical needs. Or as a panellist on the 1954 Royal Commission of Marriage and Divorce put it: “We are coming to expect more and more of our marriages.” It was these expectations that meant “marriages today are at risk to a greater extent than formerly”.

Take 99-year-old Daphne Attridge for instance. As a young woman, she served in the female army (ATS) during the war and keenly followed Philip and Elizabeth’s love story. Like many, she got engaged during the conflict (and promptly unengaged). Until she found her perfect man, she pinned her romantic hopes vicariously on the royal couple’s relationship. “We wanted to know they were in love. That mattered to us.”

This post-war companionate model of marriage has endured, but marriages in general have not necessarily. As the Commission predicted, higher expectations led to greater disappointment and a rapidly rising divorce rate. Despite the best efforts of both church and state, marital breakdown quickly became a hallmark of modern living, with Elizabeth and Philip’s union an almighty exception. But then, they were playing by different rules, weren’t they?

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There is no doubting the late Queen’s devotion to her husband; she was sticking press cuttings about sailor Philip’s wartime adventures into her scrapbook aged 14. As for the nomadic Prince, steadfast Elizabeth was a game-changer. However, their union lent heavily on more independent models of marriage in vogue in the early 20th century: Elizabeth did not hang out with Philip’s “funny friends” who entertained him in Soho supper clubs, at Cowdray Park playing polo, and on (and off) the River Solent. She avoided Cowes Week “like the plague”, pursued separate equine hobbies, had agency and income that vastly outstripped her husband’s and slept in her own bedroom. (According to the author and campaigner Marie Stopes, interwar champion of Married Love, the latter was a sensible move. Apparently separate bedrooms prevent “everyday association” which “tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the other”.)

By all accounts, even Charles was irked by his father’s latter-day friendship with Penny; perhaps he was also miffed that there had been a spread featuring 13 women in Tatler, entitled “The Duke of Edinburgh’s Fan Club”. And yet somehow, in both cases, Philip got away with his reputation enhanced: a raffish old man at worst. Who could resist the outspoken Duke in his dotage, stumbling around Sandringham, riding carriages with his sometime blonde companion and driving when dangerously old? Like his father, Charles had also inherited Mountbatten as a pre-marriage mentor, but with very different results. Times had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye no longer washed in a society where divorce was prevalent, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club.

Elizabeth and Philip’s union was forged in a different age, when commitment to monarchy and marriage trumped everything else. Ultimately their 73-year union not only stood the test of time, it was a great success, and one which the couple were justifiably proud of. The Queen, never an open book, divulged her tips for a successful marriage in 1972 — the year of the couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary — explaining that a Christian marriage should be “tolerant and understanding”. Fifty years later, the Duke confirmed the Queen had “tolerance in abundance”.

Exactly what that says about the dynamics within our late monarch’s marriage is open to interpretation, as the Duke no doubt intended. After all, Elizabeth and Philip came from an old-fashioned school of thought — it was important to be seen, but, where possible, royalty should not let in too much “daylight upon the magic”. As Walter Bagehot explained, “its mystery is its life”.

At the same time, I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son, King Charles III’s, views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the centre of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992: one son, Andrew, divorced; a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids; her daughter, Anne, separated; another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and her house burned down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis’.”

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamour. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private, as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

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You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. None has expressed this better than CS Lewis:

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honour millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarised and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen, too, followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase — “we’ll meet again” — that instantly conjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the Royal Family stayed in London, even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.

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Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before. When I grew up studying the Normans and the Plantagenets and the Tudors, they were not just artifacts of the distant past, but deeply linked to the present by the monarchy’s persistence and the nation’s thousand-year survival as a sovereign state — something no other European country can claim.

The Queen was crowned in the cathedral where kings and queens have been crowned for centuries, in the same ceremony, with the same liturgy. To have that kind of symbolic, sacred, mystical thread through time and space is something that is simply a gift from the past that the British people, in their collective wisdom, have refused to return.

A version of this piece first appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s Substack.

Charles’s guest of honour, on her birthday, was his long-suffering mistress. She was then the crossroads where all national snobberies meet: a tabloid had recently printed a picture of her next to a horse, then asked: “Which one would you rather go to bed with?” The party was widely interpreted as an insult, but it was more of an apology to Camilla Parker Bowles. No other Royal attended.

A quarter of a century on and Camilla’s 75th birthday presents are the guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and a television special on ITV. The documentary reveals that she has shared a fag with Jeremy Clarkson, and her approach to life is to “just get on with it”. Through the cameras, and on the pages, she appears unaffected. Is this Camilla an actual person? Or a spit-and-polish construct designed behind-the-scenes to fill a vacancy when the Queen dies? 

Suspicions about her have lasted. Only 13% of the public believe that Camilla should be Queen. (It will happen, regardless.) In the run up to her birthday next week, newspapers wonder how Camilla has “won everyone round”, but she remains, in tabloidese, a “controversial figure”. The public are persistent Diana partisans. They do not get on with it. Like some of our politicians, for them it is eternally 1997, and Diana’s car will always be heading towards a smash. Against this sentimental legend, Camilla has nothing to offer but her Jack Russell terriers, being “nice” to photographers, and that time she laughed at some Inuit throat singers. She becomes a mirror of her mother-in-law — a quiet enigma.

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Still, the essentials are not at all mysterious. War hero father becomes a wine merchant, and a mildly amusing writer. Mother: knitting, wealthy, and deb of the year 1939. School friends remember Camilla’s ability to stand in the cold for longer than normal. (This will prove useful later in her life.) There is nothing to suggest the formation of an unusual character.

She passes fewer O-levels than Jeremy Corbyn. (Similarly, Diana Spencer’s most notable academic achievement is to win a school prize for best-tended guinea pig.) She likes hunting, and blowing cones of smoke between tokes of her Marlboros. Camilla Shand is of her class but slightly before her times. She is tomboyish and funny, consequently perfect for the men in the Polo scene, with their frighteningly monosexual educations.

Camilla was brought up to be a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. Today Camilla, if the pages of Country Life are anything to go by, is a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. What Virginia Woolf called “tweed-wearing, sterling dull… with grim good sense”. Dog hairs deeply woven into clothes, the first G&T a little early; silly nicknames and beef on Sundays. Solid lives that have scarcely changed since the days of Pitt the Younger. In Country Life and Camilla’s vanishing England, it’s possible — even encouraged — to forget the passage of entire centuries.

The first marriage is described as a “major social event” by all the future biographies — because Princess Anne is there. Camilla Shand becomes a Parker Bowles. Her fast London days slow to a manor in Wiltshire, where she gardens and hunts. Her husband, known as Andrew “Poker Bowles”, is one of those libertine Catholics. He behaves badly, confesses, then throws his chips on the table again. He is prouder to be the inspiration for a character in a Jilly Cooper novel than of his marriage.

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This might have gone on until the grave. Camilla might have planted peonies in her garden for decades, might never have had to give up her pack a day, might have read the Sunday Telegraph next to Andrew at breakfast last weekend. But for Charles.

When they first met, he was not exactly Bond. In front of a white pavilion, amid billowing elms, across from a vividly green grass pitch. It was a civilised, convivial, and slightly alarming scene — polo at Smith’s Lawn. Camilla in 1972 was at the height of her sensuousness. Young Charles was the most magnificent job-seeker in a land filling up with them. He slept with his teddy bear. He believed the way to a woman’s heart was to play practical jokes on them — his favoured aphrodisiacs were exploding envelopes packed with rubber bands. Suavity was distant.

The relationship began. From the start, disdain wrapped itself around Camilla like a bag over a head. The Queen praised her for her lack of guile and ambition, without realising she was praising Camilla for what she most admired about herself. The sinister Lord Mountbatten (Charles’ male mentors are always sinister) called her a “good learning experience”. At this height, in this society, people and ponies are easily confused. Senior figures in Charles’s life believed, archaically, that she was not “pure” enough for him. He did nothing to challenge them.

Though he knew as early as 1972 that he loved Camilla, Charles married Diana. A binary emerged; one day the country would be invited to take sides. Where Camilla was unoriginal and unimaginative, Diana was theatrical and neurotic. Camilla was stage scenery, Diana was Othello. Camilla didn’t feel things; Diana would weep at the sight of a bracelet. Charles literally had one job: marry well. He blew it. “Is it possible to love two women at the same time,” he asked, the night before his blockbuster marriage. The answer, unhappily enough, will forever be: yes and no. By the late Eighties, pictures of the prince show smoke signals wafting from his eyes. His hours of happiness seemed burned through.

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Raised by a coterie of what Prince Philip delicately called “nannies, nurses, and poofs”, the Prince of Wales was not prepared for a constitutional position that demanded epic stoicism. He was dimly aware of this mismatch between role and temperament. Battered by alternating gusts of public hatred and public reverence, he forgot himself. Once asked by a boy in Malaysia, “Who are you?” He replied: “I wish I knew”.

His solution was Camilla. When the public discovered this, and his first marriage ended, Charles’s mistress became as fascinating to the world as a goat with four heads. Typically, the world then asked the wrong questions about the relationship. Philip had told Diana that he could not imagine anyone in “their right mind” leaving her for Camilla.

The Duke’s words echoed throughout the Nineties, and they still echo today. Camilla was called an old boiler and a trout, fat and gaunt, a witch and a vampire. Mohammed Al-Fayed nastily said she looked “like something from a Dracula film”. Against this, the press compared Diana’s generational beauty. Camilla became the most hated woman in England. Like Anne Boleyn, she was considered a schemer, an opportunist, and a sexual predator. If there were still chopping blocks, Camilla would have graced them as Boleyn did. Instead she faced the stocks. In an eccentric (and rather late) attempt to regulate the nation’s extinct moral verities, women pelted her with rolls in a supermarket car park. Camilla went into hiding and did what Elizabeth II would have done. She said nothing. Charles’s approval rating was lower than Prince Andrew’s is today.

The supposed mystery of Charles and Camilla invited speculation. What exactly did Charles see in her, demanded the British public. A backwards question. The better one was: what did Camilla see in Charles? He might have been heir to the throne, but the throne wasn’t what it had been a century before. That is the real enigma. The answer is the one word the British flee from fastest. Love.

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Admittedly, it was not the most straightforward kind. Camilla’s love for him has been compared to a mother’s — a love smothered by fear. Nicky Haslam told the New Yorker: “It’s like a rope attached to her. There’s something very, very strong from her to him — almost umbilical.” When Diana left Highgrove, Charles purged his estate of all traces of his wife. Gone were the pink sofas and soft toys in favour of red curtains and tapestry covers. The interior designer Dudley Poplak saw the new rooms, and said Charles was withdrawing into the womb. He was going back to Camilla.

​​Charles is technically related to a divinity. He is said to be descended, via Alfred the Great, from the Saxon god Woden. But being Prince of Wales invites stasis, and semi-permanent adolescence. The woman he ended up with was always going to be a mother, not a whirlwind. This is what the public has never understood, and why they are wrong about Camilla becoming Queen consort. The closest replacement available for Elizabeth II — sane, steady, consistent — is Camilla. It might be a bit unconventional on Charles’ part. But it is good for the country.

Contemplate a day in her life. Hours of public ceremonial. A voice in your ear telling you who you are meeting and what to say. Half a dozen fixed smiles in every freshly painted room. Speeches and remarks heavily rehearsed. You can’t even smoke anymore. Next Tuesday you will open a new hospital ward in Northampton. Prince Harry calls your husband a “tit” in a podcast interview. This trends on Twitter. He is suing another newspaper. It rains.

But like her mother-in-law she goes on. Old structures are resilient. It is hard to conceive that anyone as publicly wounded as Camilla could also retain a sense of humour. Even in the artificial world of guest editorships and documentaries, though, you can see it. She is the only Royal who doesn’t seem fantastically annoyed by The Crown — she’s had so much worse.

Wrapped in royal tinsel, Camilla might be the last hard kernel of an Englishwoman left. History would have made most people in her position a fool, or sent them mad. Instead it has given her a gift, albeit a rather tainted one: being our Queen. It’s the least she deserves.

I remember feeling slightly perturbed — was globalisation starting to flatten out the differences between cultures? But then again, the instructions were strange, because the globe seemed to love Britishness: the most successful British shows abroad, from Keeping Up Appearances to The Crown, seem very British. It’s literally impossible that the latter, which just cleaned up at the Emmys in LA, could be set or made anywhere else.

Is the Britishness of the nation’s television industry under threat, then? The Government seems to think so. Hours before being relieved of his responsibilities as Minister of State for Media and Data, John Whittingdale MP addressed the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge, announcing that plans are being drawn up to protect “distinctively British” television programming. Ofcom have been asked to provide a definition of Britishness for public service broadcasters to adhere to, to ensure their shows are “iconic, not generic”.

It’s not clear what that actually means. Whittingdale offered up some examples of programmes apparently containing the required amount of Britishness, but his selection was wildly random. Fleabag, Derry Girls, Doctor Who, Line Of Duty and, very peculiarly, the Carry On films, which weren’t made for television and which spluttered out over 40 years ago. Perhaps realising this, Whittingdale was forced to say that Britishness is a “nebulous concept” that’s “hard to define,” but that “we all know it when we see it”.

If opaque blather is one of these nebulous British qualities, then Whittingdale’s speech definitely flies the flag very proudly. Reading through it again, I think (though it’s hard to be sure) that what the government are concerned about is a fear that global investment — and the increasingly global reach of television audiences — will flatten out particularly local cultural differences. The focus is programmes made by the UK’s public service broadcasters, which essentially means our five terrestrial channels and their offshoots. Shows made by the streamers in Britain — like The Crown or Sex Education — won’t face this requirement at all.

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Personally, I can’t wait for Ofcom’s definition — and to see it leap into action used to vet scripts and productions to meet these requirements. Imagine the notes programme makers might get. “Needs more tutting”. “Ten per cent more awkward diffidence, please.” “Not enough spinsters cycling to communion down country lanes on misty autumn evenings.” But the principle isn’t as absurd as it sounds. The French have had a system — a much more rigorous one, the exception culturelle — for decades, supposedly protecting French culture through things like a 40% quota on French music on radio, and a limit on non-French TV programming.

The irony in this is that global investment into streaming technology has actually given viewers much easier access to distinctive TV shows from countries with smaller cultural heft. Shtisel from Israel, Babylon Berlin from Germany, Suburra from Italy are all very much products of their particular heritages — and come with the option of dubbed versions or subtitles in a multiplicity of languages.

The problem, then, is not globalisation but Americanisation. That’s what people usually mean when they talk about global culture becoming generic. Let’s face it, nobody is concerned that their culture is in danger of becoming more Polish or Indian. British TV is uniquely vulnerable to being Americanised because of our common language, but again this process is very hard to pinpoint or prevent. Phrases and concepts that once seemed very American have always passed into our culture without our even noticing — it can be a jolt to realise that phrases like “out to lunch”, “reaching out to” someone, or even “going for a drink” were not so long ago regarded as amusingly American. You can’t really blame TV for that; and TV won’t stop it from happening.

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The Britishness directive strikes me as a very British fudge, then, and deeply silly. But, predictably, the reaction to this daft idea was even sillier — and revealed something far more telling about British culture, and the British cultural establishment, than Whittingdale did. Because across Twitter the great and the good — writers, programme makers, academics — immediately went bananas.

Actor Mark Dexter tweeted “So basically this truly chilling announcement … means it’s now up to Nadine Dorries MP to decide whether or not your exciting new TV drama is ‘British enough’ for broadcast. A sprinkle of fascism on your cucumber sandwich, sir?” Professor Tanja Bueltmann, chair in International History at the University of Strathclyde, had a “real shivers down the spine moment”.

There were reams of this stuff. “Can’t wait to see shows chocked (sic) full of xenophobia and institutional racism”; “the return of serfdom, degradation and poverty”; “Bet there is a bidding war on the rights to On The Buses and other pro-colonialism tv shows”; “more “Britishness” on tv is a small way of making war an easier sell”.

For these people, modern Britain, quite possibly the most racially harmonious society in human history, is permanently on the teetering brink of fascism. Poor creatures, for whom the sight of Sid James chuckling randily from his tent-flap as Barbara Windsor’s bra pings off into the scandalised face of Kenneth Williams summons a vision of labour camps and jackbooted stormtroopers. This fear of imminent totalitarianism appears to be serious, and they appear to think the British government does have the will, and the power, to control culture like its Chinese counterpart. It’s a shame, and really quite bizarre, that their first reaction to thinking about the cultural qualities of their own country is to associate them with political factions that never got a hold here even when they dominated in parts of Europe.

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Not that the last five years of discourse recognise it, but being distinctively British is very different from being fascistic. I work in the industry, and I can’t think of any British TV show, ever, that you could think was explicitly, unquestioningly patriotic, let alone nationalistic. Downton Abbey and The Crown have the trappings of heritage but they’re hardly unquestioning uncritical flag wavers. Further back, Dad’s Army and It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum, made by people with a recent living memory of the last war, portrayed the British as hapless, incompetent blunderers. Any junta that’s relying on Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones as a role model for its übermenschen has a serious problem.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of distinctive Britishness in TV is just that sort of affectionate self-deprecation. A very large percentage of the icons of British television, from Tony Hancock all the way up to the Captain in Ghosts, are loveable idiots with an inflated or totally inaccurate vision of themselves and the world around them — in a strange way, rather like the people who exploded at Whittingdale’s speech.

Television is overwhelmingly produced by these quite posh, or posh-grovelling, people whose view of the country, its past and its people, is skewed — you only have to look at any recent BBC drama set before the Sixties, such as World On Fire or The ABC Murders to see that, or that episode of The Crown with the council street party celebrating the end of the Falklands War too — and as we can see from the reaction to Whittingdale’s naff wheeze, often quite crazily so. Almost every TV show, good or bad in itself, comes from the same lofty standpoint, which sees the working class as either cosy, hopeless victims or easily led, bigoted troglodytes. This is the problem — not global investment.

But perhaps it’s also the solution. The most British thing I can think of? A jumpy, grumpy, upper middle class white man convinced the country is on the brink of fascism. Make a TV show about that.

This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.

Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.

There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”

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But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.

Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes”; Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy.

Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. This isn’t just bluster. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”.

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And yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. (He gives thanks that he inherited the “long, flat Lascelles thighs.”) His main interest as a young man — just like Edward VIII’s — was to be active. A series of possible careers — Foreign Office, stockbroker, journalist — were tried, hated, failed or simply never started. Without the war, he would have been edging towards becoming a drifter. Instead, despite a somewhat inactive war, he was awarded the Military Cross.

After the Armistice, he worked for his brother-in-law, the Governor of Bombay. Writing to his uncle Adolphus Liddell (another slightly lost soul) he said: “there is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.” We might be surprised at this lack of admiration for imperial flummery. This is, after all, Alan Lascelles: reactionary, establishment stalwart, slayer of marriages, arch defender of the old order. But it was precisely this slightly detached view that made him such a good courtier.

Lascelles believed in the substance of royalty, not just the display. The day after George V died, nearly 20 years after that complaint about imperial flummery, the King’s body was taken to a little church at the end of the garden at Sandringham for a small private ceremony ahead of the large, public spectacle:

“The guardsmen, with scarcely a sound, slung the coffin on their shoulders and laid it before the altar; and there, after a very brief service, we left it, to be watched for thirty-six hours by the men of the Sandringham Estate. I daresay when all the tumult and shouting dies, that little ceremony will remain in my mind as the most impressive of all.”

Lascelles was not the sort of Royalist who was in it for the memorial plates and days out at the park. He was a genuine believer. He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration. He was burying the head of his tribe. This is why there was such a kerfuffle with the new King. Edward VIII wanted to run a very different sort of tribe.

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Lascelles’s history with Edward VIII is essential to understanding later events. When he returned from India in 1920, his friend Letty Elcho brought him a letter offering a job with Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales. Lascelles was attracted to the job partly because St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but mostly because “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince, and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual”. Remarkably, had this job not come along, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm.

This deep admiration would not last, and Lascelles’s ability to see the ridiculous in the Royal was important to his role as a courtier. After nine years of watching the Prince drink, gamble, womanise, neglect his duties, be rude to members of the British establishment, and — shockingly for the feudal Alan — show very little interest when there was a scare that George V might die, he stormed out in 1929, in the sort of resignation so many of us have dreamed of making:

When he asked me why I wanted to leave him, I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.

Most of us, after such an exit, would never go back. And Lascelles had only drifted into the role. Quitting it, he called himself “an inverted Falstaff” (because he was thin, just as thin in middle age as when he was young), leaving Prince Hal to “work out his own damnation”. But, after two years of reading and gardening with his family in the country, and a stint working for the Governor General in Canada, he was asked to re-join the Royal staff.

At first, he refused. The job was with George V, who he once described as “the godhead” — but Lascelles had said in his resignation letter: “Very few men can go on being private secretaries all their lives, and I am not one of them.” And besides, he pointed out, when the king died, he would be in a very difficult position, to put it mildly, having told the next-in-line exactly what he thought of him. Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary — who was hiring Lascelles to be his assistant — told him not to worry. The King was in splendid health and had years left in him. Lascelles wrote to his wife Joan saying he was going to take the job: “It is no use going about the world singing ‘God Save the King’ if one isn’t prepared to assist the Deity when called upon.”

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And so, in January 1936, he travelled to Norfolk to start his new job. He had found a first-class carriage reserved for him at Liverpool Street. Once the journey was underway, “a young man appeared in the doorway of my carriage. I was about to tell him to go away when I recognised him as the Duke of York.” It was a good thing he recognised him. The young man would accede as George VI within 12 months, and Lascelles would become his Private Secretary in 1943. The Duke of York said to him halfway through the journey, “What’s all this about the King not being well?” George V died within four days. The soulless Edward was king.

And so, from a combination of lassitude, duty, and blue-blooded patriotism, Lascelles ended up as Assistant Private Secretary to a man he was morally repulsed by. Gentlemen do not just drop out of Royal service because they dislike the new King. It is perhaps surprising that Edward kept Lascelles on. But it seems obvious from this distance — as it seemed to Lascelles then — that Edward had never planned to make it that far and wasn’t going to stay long.

The royal family is meant to bring spectacle to our lives by displaying theirs: a glittering pageant of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. As the monarchy lost power through the nineteenth century, they replaced it with performance. Public engagement became Queen Victoria’s way of maintaining her relevance. And this new mode of royal existence is part of what made Edward VIII such a star as Prince of Wales: his tours of America, Canada, and South Africa were massive successes. But by the end of George V’s reign, British royalty had consolidated a new covenant with the people: “private probity, public spectacle.”

Lascelles was the high priest of the Georgian model and had seen first-hand that Edward was all public spectacle and no private probity. A courtier out of duty (and because he found nothing else to do), he realised that unless the royal family stuck to its principles — to the principles forced on it by a changing world — it would suffer. To the extent that he was a propagandist, an enemy of Edward VIII, a reactionary, and everything else he is claimed to be, it was because he realised the royal family had very little choice. Much of what Lascelles is said to have brought about may well have been inevitable as monarchy adjusted to democracy.

He had always been a slightly unwilling courtier. (He told his daughter long after he retired that, if he could have his life again, he would breed horses. “Racehorses, or cart-horses: any sort of horses.”) He was good at it, though. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually be remembered as the last of the old school who helped the monarchy transition to its modern function — or as a crusty old reactionary who needlessly destroyed a clutch of happy lives. But when his archives are eventually dusted off, I doubt we will find any dark secrets in there. We already know the fundamentals. He was a man who believed in royal morals underpinning royal spectacles.

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What would he make of the modern monarchy? In his 1990 review of Philip Ziegler’s Edward VIII, Christopher Hitchens observed that “the magic of the throne is now inextricable from Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump — the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture.” This line might stand as a eulogy for the Lascelles’s school: that there is little point in having a Royal Family unless they adhere to certain difficult and sometimes out-of-date principles. For Lascelles, as for the public at that time, those principles were about marriage. One of the last things he did was sit in the garden of Kensington Palace to watch the firework celebrations of Charles and Diana’s wedding. The next day, he asked for news about the event every few minutes, anxious it should all be going well. He died two weeks later.

Undoubtedly, the sort of revelations we have heard about the Royal Family since would have been anathema to his sense of decorum. But Tommy didn’t speculate. A young man from the BBC once tried to persuade him to appear in what Lascelles called “a television orgy on The Future of the British Monarchy”. Lascelles gave a forthright reply: “I told him I would as soon walk stark naked down Piccadilly.” We might find it easy to dismiss him as an old fogey. But how confidently can we say that we are beyond his concerns about private probity? Are we above worrying about what makes an acceptable royal spouse?

This was a loyalty test to the Pax Romana, targeted especially at Christians, for whom pagan sacrifices were inherently sinful. Failure to sacrifice to the ancient gods was punishable by torture and death. Some Christians refused and were martyred, including Pope Fabian himself. Others went into hiding. Some went through the motions, made the sacrifice, and so were excommunicated.

After the persecution died down, a furious row erupted within the church concerning the re-admission of the lapsed. Some maintained there was to be no readmission whatsoever. Others were content with a simple confession and repentance. An ideological war broke out between these sides, both electing their own bishops, both setting up a church within a church to battle it out with each other.

Some church leaders, notably St Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, tried to steer a middle path. He was largely successful, not least because of the credit he had established on both sides through his widely appreciated pastoral response to the pandemic that came to be named after him. But despite his success in ameliorating a divided church, there was one principle on which he wouldn’t budge, and his formulation of it became a central feature of Roman Catholic doctrine: extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the church there is no salvation. The fallen had to be re-admitted to the church because outside the church there is only eternal damnation.

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Parallels with the current travails of the Labour party are hard to miss. Pope Starmer has re-admitted the lapsi, based on a flimsy expression of repentance, hoping the fact that he is generally perceived to be having a good pandemic will distract the No Readmission party. And it may. But although these parallels are something of a historical parlour game, the principle that lies behind them remains as strong and as contentious as ever it was: extra Ecclesiam nulla salus – outside the party there is no salvation.

To many of us, who just don’t care about party politics as much as those within the Westminster bubble, the comings and goings of Corbyn, or indeed of Cummings for that matter, are nowhere near as important as they are to the true believers. Corbyn protested his suspension by re-affirming his total loyalty to the party of which, he reminded people, he has been a member of for 54 years. Nor could he bring himself to update his Twitter profile: “Labour MP for Islington North.” Life outside the party would be unimaginable for him. In a Cyprian-like compromise, Starmer has now allowed Corbyn back in to the Labour Party; though, for the time being, without the party whip. It doesn’t make much sense. But that isn’t really the point. Like Cyprian, Starmer is trying to manage some bitter divisions, and a messy compromise is the obvious path to tread.

Of course, there are many who have flourished extra Ecclesiam. Ed Balls reinvented himself through sequins, from a party hack with something of a hard man reputation, to become a personable almost national treasure. Something similar happened with Michael Portillo and trains. There is, it seems life beyond the party. Politics isn’t everything. Indeed, it is precisely by accepting that idea that some find rehabilitation, new life.

And here we come to the heart of Corbyn’s fundamental weakness as a politician. He is too much in love with the party, with its ideology, with its internal struggles, to connect up with those for whom politics is not everything. One just cannot imagine him outside the Labour party, and nor, it seems, can he. And because of this, he has missed his opportunity for redemption.

This is what he should have done. He should have put on his wellington boots and settled down on his allotment to tend his leeks. A period of silence would have been welcome. And a more genuine act of contrition. But above all, he, like so many politicians, just needed to discover who he is outside of the confines of his narrow little church. I don’t know what the secular equivalent to this is, but he needed to spend a bit more time on his own with his God.

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No, my marriage is not a "second holocaust"

By Giles Fraser

Princess Margaret was given a very perceptive line in the new series of The Crown. Invited to a weekend up at Balmoral, Mrs Thatcher continued to work on her dispatch boxes rather than go out stalking with the royal family. No time for fun, Thatcher insisted tartly. But she might find something much more important than fun out on the moors, the Princess shot back. She might find “perspective”. And in that single word, the princess captured so much that can be lacking in the professional politician.

Everything may be political, but the political isn’t everything. Most people have far more important things going on in their lives – their loved ones, their families (not necessarily the same thing), doing the shopping, listening to music, yes, even watching Strictly and The Crown. Generally speaking, the Conservatives tend to understand this much better than the Labour party. They are often the political party voted for by those who do not think that politics is the most important thing in the world. It is significant, for instance, that the Conservatives have something like just 190,000 members, whereas Labour has well over half a million, most of them having joined after Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

This is often seen as a Labour strength, and, of course, having activists turn out and bang on doors, is a real campaigning advantage. But it comes with its downside too. For when a political party is dominated by true believers, perspective narrows and it becomes obsessed with what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. It’s not unlike that with church. Yes, it is good to have people who make the church their life. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the church being able to continue without such people. But this also is true: too much religion is bad for your faith. What begins as a life transforming dialogue with the infinite can all too easily end up being a bitter row with the flower arrangers, or about who gets to sit in what pew.

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Is Corbyn really an anti-Semite?

By Paul Embery

That is what Corbyn did to the Labour party. Yes, his lazy and complacent attitude towards anti-Semitism – even complicit attitude – has damaged the party for a generation at least. But there was something else that he got badly wrong: he seemed to act as though his party was more important than the country that he apparently wanted to lead. And he inspired others to think the same. Party above all things. That is why his suspension from Labour was so impossible for him to bear. He is a man who has nothing left outside the party, a man whose identity is so consumed by left wing ideology that there is nothing remaining when that is gone. Corbyn without Labour was the shell of a man. And very few ordinary voters can identify with such a view.

The greatest ever Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, offered a very different perspective to that of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. He argued that the church is “the only organisation that exists solely for the benefit of non-members”. It’s a great line — though it is not only churches that work like this, and indeed, a great many churches don’t. Under Corbyn, the Labour party retreated down the rabbit hole of increasing ideological purity, obsessed with their own inner workings. And what many members still fail to grasp is that, unlike them, most people don’t like politics. And these are the people whose votes they need. This is a kind of paradox: to really succeed in politics you have to care more about things beyond it.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

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How the Left betrayed feminism

By Sarah Ditum

Previous series of The Crown dig deep into the problems of exercising power while female. One of the most fraught moments comes in series one, when the young Queen wants her children to have the surname Mountbatten after their father, and her advisors overrule her on the grounds that the royal family must carry the royal name: should feminist sensibilities celebrate the triumph of the matrilineal principle, or mourn the crushing of a woman’s will? But Thatcher never had a name worth fighting over, and she certainly didn’t have anything as grand as service to God and country to rest her claims on.

Instead, she had to invent what being a woman in power on her own account looked like. She had to invent herself. As Caroline Slocock put it in People Like Us, her memoir of her time as Thatcher’s private secretary, Thatcher had to “manage the tensions between ‘being feminine’ — and therefore submissive — and being authoritative”. Women in politics walk a narrow path with firepits either side. Four decades and many female world leaders on from Thatcher, the strategies to make that crossing are better defined, but plenty of women still flounder on the problem that power is perceived as a masculine trait: succeed at being in charge and you risk failing at being a woman.

Donald Trump played off this relentlessly to help his defeat of Hillary Clinton, and Clinton wasn’t nimble enough to neutralise it. Part of her problem was that she really is a feminist: she has a consistent analysis of women’s oppression, and she used that analysis to explain the attacks on her. Unfortunately, telling people why they’re wrong to find you chilly isn’t a great way to make them warm to you. Thatcher, on the other hand, was the one who said: “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” She never appointed a woman to her cabinet. In The Crown, she tells a nonplussed Queen that women are “too emotional” in general for the business of government.

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Downton Abbey makes fools of us all

By Tanya Gold

All this was (and remains) maddening, because of course Thatcher owed something to women’s lib, whether you mean the right to engage in politics as established by the suffrage movement, or the right to have a job as established by the second wave. But tactically, separating herself from feminism was fundamental to her success. Feminism was something ugly, dangerous, even seditious.

Not very long after Thatcher came to power, the female separatist Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest against nuclear arms. This was something truly radical: a defiance of the patriarchal family, a denunciation of militarism. You could tell they’d got under conservative skins when Auberon Waugh claimed Greenham smelled “of fish paste and bad oysters”, as though it were a sickening riot of femaleness in excess. It was also in a way a gift to Thatcher, I think, because here was exactly the thing she was not. If you found the Greenham women alarming, look to Thatcher instead – trundling around in a tank with her head peeping out the turret, headscarfed and smiling, an unlikely but perfect confection of feminine grace and firepower.

Feminine grace. One of the caricatures of Thatcher was that she was mannish — Spitting Image put her in an aggressively tailored suit that was nothing like the gem-bright skirt suits she actually wore. Although she cultivated her voice into an artificially low register to avoid sounding “shrill” (if anything, Anderson’s excellent portrayal softens the Thatcher voice, which in retrospect is an extraordinarily odd instrument), in every other way she played up her femaleness. The Crown shows her to us at her dressing table, surrounded with the implements of ladylike self-creation; it shows her dishing up supper for her cabinet, a performance of the good housewife that is tantamount to camp.

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Why the Iron Lady is an icon for our times

By Ian Birrell

But while Thatcher expertly softened the edges of her authority with little-woman details, the truth is that she was able to take her place in politics because she had something that set her apart from almost all her sex: she had a wife. Or rather she had Denis, a husband so unusually supportive of her, and so notably happy to act the consort, that he essentially played the role that political wives have always done, enhancing her prospects rather than draining her efforts to support his own.

Thatcher’s rejection of feminism means she probably had very little idea how unique her own marriage was, although The Crown portrays it very sweetly — and the comparison with what we’ve seen in the previous series of Prince Phillip’s struggles and resentments at playing support act to his own wife makes Denis’s qualities obvious. He especially shines in episode two, when the Thatchers are invited for a hunting weekend with the Windsors at Balmoral. It is a disaster, with the Thatchers floundering against the opaque etiquette, but it’s not purely a matter of the posh excluding the commoners: we see Thatcher briskly telling Denis “we don’t want to catch any upper-class habits”. This is not a couple seeking assimilation to the aristocracy.

For my whole life, I’ve been interested in Thatcher mostly because she was a woman. When I was a child, she fascinated me simply because she had red hair and was female, like me; as I got older, I spent more time thinking about the subtleties of her public image, the calculations that had gone into making that persona. But the version of her in The Crown — and I think this is true to the historical Thatcher as well — is one who sees her sex as the least interesting thing about her. Class, though — class was always a preoccupation, and a propellant for her radical kind of conservativism. Margaret Thatcher, class warrior: maybe that’s a kind of Thatcher it’s politically allowable to like, after all.

The first season opened, nine years ago, with the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the loss of the Abbey’s heir. If this was a metaphor for the withering of the British aristocracy, Downton Abbey did not follow through. Neither did reality: the aristocracy are still more important than they should be, although they try to hide it, usually by appearing to be very stupid. Self-interested self-deprecation has replaced a sword. So they cower politely, because it suits them.

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Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

It is decadent to watch television that details a nation’s oblivious self-hatred, but Americans do it often. In the superhero film genre they cannot stop imagining their own mass deaths. It is as if they long for it to happen and cannot stop imagining how exactly they will die, and how they will feel.

In Britain we are more subtle but only slightly; instead of alien raids and broken cities we imagine a class system we should be happy to see wither return in full pomp: a happy nation under a benevolent aristocrat, who may assume a faint anxiety disorder, should he be seen to be enjoying it too much. We wear social democracy much too lightly here, and that is a problem, for there is no functional hagiography for that. Marvel at the viewing figures for Downton Abbey – 13m at their height – and you would barely believe it exists at all.

I wonder, rather, if the programme and its impersonators did not contribute to the miasma of snobbery, nostalgia and brutality that encouraged Brexit, and made parliament a mockery, while the Queen sits inside a 72% approval rating. I think it is dangerous. Dream of a toy feudal state and it might eventually appear to greet you.

The trailer rolled out like a dream sequence from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s brain. There will be a royal visit to Downton Abbey, in case there is not, already, enough nobility inside Charles Barry’s mouldering Highclere Castle, which is Downton Abbey. (Barry also made the Palace of Westminster, but the Abbey is in rather better shape these days.) There is gay bunting, merry villagers, and servants in silly costumes looking grateful for the opportunity to serve.

“Welcome your Majesties,” says Lady Crawley (Elizabeth McGovern), curtseying low enough to meet the servants on the way back up. The butler Mr Carson (Jim Carter) returns from semi-retirement in an idealised tied cottage to save – I am presuming, but I would bet money on it – the royal dinner party. He will hold the class system up, by himself if needs be.

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The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

The creator of Downton Abbey is Julian Kitchener-Fellowes, who once played Lord Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen, which was an affable Scottish precursor to Downton Abbey. He was made a real lord for services to costume drama — again I presume — in 2011, with the motto post proelia praemia: After Battle Comes Reward. Battles, as master propagandists have noted, are not fought where they used to be.

When Kitchener-Fellowes is not writing, he is scheming for his wife Emma to inherit an earldom; so much so, that when Lynn Barber in an interview suggested that Emma become a man to inherit, he appeared to seriously consider it.

His worship of nobility is real. And so his Lord Crawley — Hugh Bonneville taking avuncular to some sort of awful nadir — is a kindly landlord who, among other nonsensical acts of altruism that would shame his fictional ancestors, saves his cook Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) from blindness. He married his (American) wife for money — that much of Downton Abbey is true — but he had the good manners to fall in love with her afterwards. Or was it embarrasment?

His angst aside, the lesson of Downton Abbey is that the class system exists for our benefit, even if aristocrats let Labradors emote for them, and that is a tragedy, but only for them, and without it we would become meaningless and tiny in the world. Its lesson is — we are children, and we should look to others to take care of us.

Kitchener-Fellowes is not alone in polishing the class system; others who should know better do it too, and much too well for comfort.

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Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

The Crown, for instance, now entering series 3 — the boring years of the Queen’s reign, between creamy ingenue and ancient sorceress — is funded by Netflix and written by Peter Morgan. It is clever propaganda — you pity Elizabeth Mountbatten as she becomes Elizabeth Regina — but the best propaganda is clever: state your allegiance too baldly, and you will not carry your befugged audience with you.

The Crown repeats the myth that Elizabeth II is a selfless, unusually kind woman who would rather not wear the burden of the crown. (Shakespeare wrote in this vein too. It is the familiar line of the propagandist, whether William Shakespeare or Julian Kitchener-Fellowes. You can get away with anything if people think you are doing it for their sakes). The object of devotion is sacred, and reluctant; of the impact of monarchy on others — on us, still lurking underneath all this gilded misery — you learn nothing. There is a parallel narrative but you rarely hear it publicly; it is as if we are asleep. Prince Andrew is the principal argument for this parallel narrative, but we are too unconscious to listen.

Morgan actually meets members of the royal household to describe each new piece of hagiography, which is a gruesome fate for such a fine writer. I can only imagine that, like so many biographers before him, he has fallen in love with his subject, and longs for her approval; but the British Establishment, which watched almost every other crown in Europe fall, has always worked like that. It gathers talent to itself – for what damage might it do outside?

“Respectfully,” Morgan says, “I tell them what I have in mind and they brace themselves slightly.” I doubt that. I wonder, rather, if when Morgan leaves, they perform high fives.

Morgan’s art is monarchist; he also said that Tobias Menzies’ performance as Elizabeth’s consort, “will do a lot of good for Prince Philip. Because Prince Philip is not considered a complex person.” There is a reason for that.

Elizabeth II, meanwhile, will be played by Olivia Coleman with her Academy Award for Queen Anne in The Favourite – she moved from Queen to Queen. It was the fifth Academy Award for an English monarch in the guise of an actor. There was Colin Firth for George VI, the founder of the reluctant monarch myth; Helen Mirren for Elizabeth II; Judi Dench for Elizabeth I; and Katharine Hepburn for Queen Eleanor.

This happens so often I wonder if it is hereditary monarchy they are rewarding.

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How 'The Favourite' failed Queen Anne

By Polly Mackenzie

That creators of art — but not Kitchener-Fellowes, the Conservative peer, of course — usually consider themselves progressive makes it all the more ludicrous that the shared national culture they create is, in spirit, centuries old. I await an homage to the Plantagenets, with emphasis on their cracked inter-personal relationships.

I do not suggest that social democracy is not valued because people watch Downton Abbey. I suspect is more likely that they watch Downton Abbey because they do not value social democracy as they should, and instead, dream backwards to a time when things were simpler – and worse.